Are Bert and Ernie registered at Crate and Barrel?

At first I couldn’t make out what my son was saying to his grandmother yesterday morning, pointing to his new “Ernie’s Touchdown” Sesame Street picture book. My wife tried to keep from laughing, and told him to repeat himself.

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Get used to it.

“He is Ernie’s part-i-ner,” he said, pointing at Bert in the book.

That was my doing, and I’m not particularly sorry, although outing Ernie and Bert definitely wasn’t premeditated. We used to share a babysitter with a lesbian couple who adopted, and he’s had preschool classmates with gay parents, so the concept that some of his friends have two mommies or two daddies wasn’t that unusual. But I still don’t think he understood the concept of a gay partnership, in the sense that some men love men and women love women. So when he told me a few nights ago “Ernie lives with a friend who is yellow,” I quickly blurted out “Yes, that’s his partner Bert,” and then explained all of the above.

Children’s Television Workshop’s official position has been that Bert and Ernie are “friends,” and, you know, whatever. Clay Aiken kept telling people he was straight, and no one with any sense believed him either. But I’m definitely not trying to single out Ernie and Bert, who have weathered more than their share of closeted Muppet jokes. My conversation with my son could have just as easily been about C-3PO and R2-D2, or Statler and Waldorf, or Hannity and Colmes. In fact I wish it was one of those. Learning about domestic partnerships from Bert and Ernie seems kind of cliche.

I am curious how many kids — particularly in the greater San Francisco Bay Area where there seems to be more awareness of diverse lifestyles — think that Ernie and Bert are gay. I’m guessing that even if I didn’t say anything, my son probably would have figured it out on his own. If nothing else, I hope he’s broadening his understanding of the world, which extends a few meters away to our gay neighbors, who my son had probably thought were just friends — friends whose Christmas tree just happens to look like Stanlee Gatti‘s each year.

“Ernie’s Touchdown,” incidentally, is a great book for this lesson. If you take away the words and make up some of your own, it actually appears like some kind of outdoor commitment ceremony is going on. Ernie and Bert look really happy, smiling friends Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus show up and in the end they take a plane to Provincetown jump up and down on a grassy meadow. All we need is a couple of protesters and a marriage certificate and it’s a San Francisco wedding.